Reliance AJIO to create differentiated e-commerce model for India

A New E-Commerce Model

AJIO, the newly launched online fashion venture of Reliance Retail, seeks to carve out a unique niche for itself as a premium style destination. Alongside known Indian and global brands and own labels, it brings in curated fashion from across the world. Backed by the advanced internet infrastructure built by Jio and a robust physical retail business built by Reliance Retail, AJIO aspires to create a differentiated e-commerce model for India.

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11A Multi-Channel Retail Strategy

Reliance Retail Limited (RRL), the retail arm of Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries, is not only the largest retailer in India, but has also attained market leadership in most of categories it operates in. As on 31st March 2016, it operated 3,245 stores in 532 cities across core format sectors such as value, fashion and lifestyle, digital, and jewellery.

Not so long ago, Reliance had announced its plans to adopt a multi-channel retail strategy across all its formats to tap the burgeoning e-commerce market in India. Going ahead with the plan, the company recently launched AJIO (Ajio.com), its fashion and style e-commerce platform.

It is a signiﬁcant initiative from Reliance Retail that seeks to offer a differentiated Omnichannel shopping experience and deliver tremendous choice and convenience to the consumers.

1. A Multi-Channel Retail Strategy

22The Brand Idea

AJIO.com was unveiled on April 2, 2016 at the country’s leading fashion extravaganza, Lakme Fashion Week (LFW). It is a style philosophy, a brand foremost. A style destination which offers handpicked curated fashion across a unique selection of own brand, international brands, authentic handcrafted artisanal products, inspired indie and national brands. The online store will also be offering a signiﬁcant majority of exclusive merchandise that customers will not ﬁnd elsewhere.

Its target audience is fashion lovers and trendsetters looking for exclusive accessible premium collection. The store wants to create a distinct positioning for itself in the cluttered online fashion space driven largely by discounts, and will make premium fashion accessible via excellent value. The company wants to build a brand with strong emotional connect, and aims to provide the very best price/value to the discerning consumers.

According to it, this is a more sustainable approach that will differentiate AJIO in the market.

2. The Brand...

33Fashion redeﬁned

AJIO’s endeavor is to redeﬁne the fashion by challenging the stereotypes and breaking them. AJIO’s style is inimitable, it says. It’s all about “fearless fashion” and calls out boldly on the conformism built into the society as regards fashion. For its preview showing at the LFW, AJIO made a statement with its #DoubtIsOut campaign, which appeals to the woman who is empowered, who knows what she wants to be, and is conﬁdent in being who she is.

In sync with the campaign theme, AJIO picked up unconventional showstoppers and brought in exceptional women achievers from unique genres as showstoppers who epitomise the ‘Doubt is Out’ movement.

The original Bollywood ‘item girl’ Helen walked the ramp, demonstrating ‘Age no bar’ to look stylish; the daring Sunny Leone sashayed down to say ‘Choice no bar’; the chubby and bubbly Bharti Singh, known for her stand-up comedy on reality shows, walked the ramp effortlessly to ‘Size no bar’; The ﬁrst Indian woman to ﬂy an MIG ﬁghter jet, Suman Sharma, walked the ramp for ‘Career no bar’; wrapping it up was Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, the transgender activist, stealing the show with ‘Gender no bar’.

3. Fashion redeﬁned

44Going hi-tech

As indicated by Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Limited, with the advanced internet infrastructure built by Jio and a robust physical retail business built by Reliance Retail, AJIO will create a differentiated e-commerce model for India.

The model will entail seamless integration of online and ofﬂine while innovating across superior customer experience, delivery services and payment ecosystem. AJIO will leverage Reliance’s stellar sourcing, supply chain and retail operations capabilities to differentiate further in the market.

Markedly, supply chain will be a combination of internal and external partnerships. The company is partnering with leading supply chain organizations across the country to deliver an impactful shopping experience.

In addition, it will also gain from Jio’s digital ecosystem. The platform is built leveraging best-in-class technology put together in a record time leveraging best open source and some best e-commerce off-the-shelf products.

It has considerable advantages of it being able to leverage Reliance’s state of the art JIO tech ecosystem like JIO Chat as well as Reliance Retail and JIO physical assets, thereby enabling true Omnichannel experience.

The company gave the ﬁrst hint of how it plans to revolutionize the buying experience during its launch at LFW. It presented an innovative concept of ‘Shop-able Runway’ at the show.

The ‘AJIO Shop-able Runway’ offered an instant shopping option to audiences for the outﬁ ts showcased on the ramp. By clicking a link, users could directly reach the shopping section for the speciﬁc outﬁts on AJIO’s website. The show was streamed live in order to reach out to fashionistas across the country.

4. Going hi-tech

55Inside the store

The company has strived to ensure that AJIO is easy to navigate, fun to shop, and delightful to experience. The store will mainly focus on designer wear and high-fashion international brands. An accessible premium in its truest sense, it will feature a collection of over 200 international and national brands as well as own-brand merchandise comprising apparels, lingerie, shoes, accessories and jewellery.

Apart from a wide assortment of known brands, a signiﬁcant majority of AJIO’s merchandise is exclusive as it offers curated fashion to consumers. The store offers curated ranges from several international brands from Russia, Turkey, Singapore, Australia, etc. and authentic handcrafted artisanal products, inspired indie labels from upcoming young designers, Reliance Trends, Reliance Brands and more.

With curated offering, AJIO is well-positioned to provide for all the evolving fashion and style needs of today’s consumer including handpicked Capsule Collections and the artisan-crafted Indie picks, in addition to several national and international brands.

The store’s Indie collection presents one of the ﬁnest online collections of original works by artisans and boutiques from across India and the world, on a single platform.

5. Inside the store

66Looking ahead

AJIO serves pan India, expanding rapidly over the next few months. It will be leveraging Reliance Trends for omni-channel approach which will open up many opportunities to innovate on delivery solutions and service levels going forward.

The platform has been built keeping future scale and performance expectations of consumers in mind. With this foundational platform, strong engineering team and Reliance JIO and Retail technology ecosystem being leveraged – AJIO is looking to evolve at rapid pace and would be making consumer experience more personalised, channel agnostic and experiences that bring best of both ofﬂine and online world together.

Namita Bhagat has an academic background in management and finance. She writes on the retail and franchise business in the Indian and Middle East markets, besides which, her line of work spans branding, media & public relations.